Sign Up for Special Offers and Delicious Candy! Long Beach Candy Store 2520 Mira Mar Ave. Apples and homemade treats were common gifts to trick-or-treating children in the earlier parts candy apples for sale 20th century.
Over time, parents preferred individually wrapped, store-bought candy. No cases of strangers killing or permanently injuring children this way have been proven. Commonly, the story appears in the media when a young child dies suddenly after Halloween. Medical investigations into the actual cause of death have always shown that these children did not die from eating candy given to them by strangers.
Worries that candy from strangers might be poisoned has led to the rise of alternative events to trick-or-treating, such as events held at Christian churches, police and fire stations, community centers, and retail stores. Claims that candy was poisoned or adulterated gained general credence during the Industrial Revolution, when food production moved out of the home or local area, where it was made in familiar ways by known and trusted people, to strangers using unknown ingredients and unfamiliar machines and processes. In the 1890s and 1900s, the US Bureau of Chemistry, in conjunction with state agencies, tested hundreds of kinds of candy and found no evidence of poisons or adulteration. The prevalence and persistence of these myths during the 1960s and 1970s, a time of social upheaval, greater racial integration, and improved status for women, reflected societal questions about who was trustworthy. An automobile trunk at a trunk-or-treat event at St. Due to their fears, parents and communities restricted trick-or-treating and developed alternative “safe” events, such as trunk-or-treat events held at Christian churches.